This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
"The direction defined by the writing direction" is called the "inline direction" or "inline axis" in the CSS spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/css-writing-modes-3/#inline-dimension , http://www.w3.org/TR/css-writing-modes-3/#inline-axis- . "The direction opposite to the writing direction" is called the "block axis" in the CSS spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/css-writing-modes-3/#block-axis- . A few other wordings could probably also be aligned.
I'd like to use terms from CSS writing modes in place of the terms "line" and "position", not just change the definition of those terms, though that would be an improvement. The concepts to separate out are: 1) is it a box that's being positioned/aligned or some text within that box 2) is the position in the inline direction/axis or the block direction/axis? 3) is it an absolute position or a relative alignment, and if it's an alignment, with what?